Thanks For Your Order…Your Total Is…
I hate Websites that don’t tell you the total in your shopping cart prior to checkout.
In my online travels this holiday shopping season, I’ve encountered at least two e-commerce sites that skip the order review — and it makes me wonder whether it’s intentional.
Yes, it’s true that when I go to the supermarket, I don’t accurately add up the total cost of the items in my cart as I move through the aisles. I can ballpark it pretty well — and sure there’s sometimes surprises at the register — but there’s a big difference between buying food and other basics that you need for the week and buying gifts for others online — so I don’t think the analogy works all that well as a justification for not telling customers the total in their cart prior to checkout.
One of the sites I visited had a “place order” button on the same page where I entered my shipping preferences and credit card information. After I placed my order it simply told me the amount being charged to my card — no review page.
Sure, I could have done the math prior to hitting “place order” — but can’t you tell me how much I’m going to be charged before I hit that button, instead of after the fact? I mean, what if I stink at addition and the total is higher than I expected? Then what? Too late, my order has already been placed.
One of the sites I visited – which sells food — offered an item to me at half price, as an incentive, but the offer was made too late in the checkout process. The thing is, I had already ordered a very similar item to be sent to my mailing address, and it was already in my cart, at full price.
It seems to me there could be better logic built into this e-merchant’s system (after all they seem to know a lot about me, and my personal shopping habits). It would have been good if, after I ordered the first item, a pop-up appeared that said “now that you ordered that item, how about something for yourself at half price?”
Instead, they waited until I was almost done with checkout before offering the incentive. That caused me to go back and edit my shopping cart – which in turn required me to re-enter the mailing address and other information for the order I was sending to someone else. Then I went back through checkout and THEN took advantage of the incentive. Not a major problem, but it was mildly annoying. A simple review/edit page could have solved this problem.
I’m wondering if some merchants intentionally omit the running shopping cart total and review page in the hopes that some customers will just go ahead and buy all the items in their cart, despite what the total comes to. If that’s the case, don’t they end up sort of looking bad compared to shopping sites like Amazon.com, that tell you what your running shopping cart total is as you shop? Just a thought …
